


As He Sleeps

by junjunkii



Category: Kingdom Hearts
Genre: Body Horror, Dreaming, M/M, Memories, Rough Kissing, prose
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-04-01
Updated: 2019-04-01
Packaged: 2019-12-30 04:15:16
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,668
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18307997
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/junjunkii/pseuds/junjunkii
Summary: Ventus dreams of other people’s lives; of things that happen, and things that don’t.





	As He Sleeps

Dreams fall like raindrops for him, in this state. They hit his cold skin and slide, leaving a dark trail behind as if mourning their own impermanence. A soft black veil over their formless visages, all around him, attending the funeral for his lost years.

In those years, Ventus sleeps.

The dreams come and go, come and go. Always leaving, never staying, whispering, caressing, dissipating as they begin and end simultaneously. He never remembers much, only faint flickers of emotion and the feeling of a heartbeat against his brittle ribs. He hasn’t moved for so long, so long. He hasn’t breathed. He has only slept, and let what dreams come to him flow through him on their way to people he barely remembers, or doesn’t know at all.

“You’ll be safe here.”

Is he? Is this state of living death so safe? He hasn’t been touched in years, not even by the flicker of a lash against his own cheek. Nothing moves here but the dreams. Sometimes, Ventus lives in the dreams, runs and swings and shouts with warm blood flushing him pink, but it never lasts long.

There is some boy who misses another dearly, and Ventus thinks he can feel his breathless chest stir when he sees him. _A part of me lives in you, doesn’t it?_ But there are others in there, curled tight like broken children, hedgehog hearts. Spiked and protective of what’s left of themselves.

There is a girl and a boy who are always reaching for him, and Ventus is always reaching back. His muscles ache from the stretch, despite not being alive for so much time. Five points, a reflection through coloured glass shining the moon above into his closed eyes. The metal grows cold in his colder hands, and the girl slips further into the clear blue, fighting against the pull of the tide, but the moon is so relentless. In his dreams, the moon never cares what becomes of them all. Sometimes it is not a moon but something else, something overwhelming and burning. Ventus doesn’t know what it is. The boy always disappears in its light, but he never comes back out.

There is a small, pitiful creature sometimes, watching him from the shadows beneath the throne on which he slumps. Ventus always forgets him. He hurts.

“I’m searching too.”

“For your light?”

There is a boy who is missed. He is so dearly, sorely missed. He crawls between a wall and its shadow, never quite touching either one. He cannot see. Ventus sometimes watches him through the eyes of another, flooded by the feeling of anger and jealousy. It all pools in the cavern yawning between his ribs, swirls anxiously with no place to land. Emotions stick to bones in this state, drip off the bloodied ends of fingers broken from hysterically scrabbling at the gap where a beating heart should have been.

Ventus has set a man on fire in a dream, watching his skin curl into rancid smoke like rotting paper with all the care of the moon to the tide-drowning girl.

Ventus has been kissed in a dream too, the ink of the boy whose lips he bit staining his chin and tongue a deep, sour blackberry. It drips down his neck and he never remembers who the boy is, but he always remembers the frigid gaze of gilded steel before a desperate mouth and fang-bitten nails attack him. It hurts, always, but Ventus kisses back, teeth snarling and clacking against the other’s. It’s a feral kind of hunger, one he can never understand. He gives in to it.

Then, he forgets.

_Face them._

Face them.

Whose face is it?

_The face of your fears._

There is nothing to fear here. Ventus is safe, Ventus is hidden from even a mote of dust to disturb his slumber. So why does his breath seem to quicken when the starbursts on the backs of his eyelids go red? He does not breathe, he can not breathe, he cannot feel anticipation or desire. It must all be a dream then, when the blackberry boy appears again and again and again, because Ventus forgets him again and again and again. Like the ticking of a clock with no sense of time, it happens endlessly, ebbing and flowing like the ocean the girl’s lungs have long been filled with by now. Sometimes Ventus sees things from her view, or at least tries to- it’s all black and hopeless. It’s the quietest dreams he has. There is simply nothing there.

“When will you remember me?” The soured, angry boy is crying now, hateful, and Ventus’ eyes are open so it must be a dream again. “When will you let me stop this?”

Ventus trails icy fingers along his cheek. It’s wet with tears, streaked with the salty residue. The boy makes a choked sound and collapses with his heavy head in Ventus’ lap, clutching at his wrists with shaking hands. “Don’t pity me,” he begs, and Ventus slips a hand free to run it through the boy’s wine-dark locks, and makes him sob even harder.

“I don’t pity you, my fallen angel.”

“Don’t call me that,” the angel spits.

Ventus cradles his twisted face, tips it up to meet his own in a soft kiss. “My other half.”

“I hate you.”

“I know.”

And they kiss for a while, suspended in the dream, surrounded by nothing but the passing of time.

“You won’t remember me when I go,” the angel whispers finally, feeling the pull of another dream at the edges of their vision. “You never do.”

“Then you’ll just have to come back,” Ventus says. His eyelids start to weigh down, and he struggles to keep his hold on the broken boy who’s slid to kneel at his feet like a knight to his king. “You always come back, don’t you?”

“I’ll find you,” the angel promises breathlessly, swirls of himself starting to curl away like woodsmoke. “I’ll find you, Ventus.”

“Come back,” Ventus murmurs, fighting against the sleep again. He can’t move his leaden body, can’t feel the way his blood sang through his veins as they kissed. He doesn’t know who he wants to come back, doesn’t know who is in front of him now. As his eyes slip close the spreading of wings draws the dream to an end like heavy curtains, and it’s all gone.

The dreams don’t stick, after that. They rush a little faster, tumbling clumsily through Ventus’ struggling conscious. He wants to remember. He wants to know why he’s so sad, when he hasn’t felt emotion in years. He wants to know if the dreams aren’t staying because he’s already caught in a much bigger one, one that cloaks and suffocates him until he can’t feel anything but sadness.

He takes a breath.

Exhales.

His eyelids twitch.

Then he sinks back in, chest full of pins and needles that quickly fade to nothing again. But it was something. His time of dreaming is drawing to a close, but he still has a few more to sift through.

A much older man Ventus doesn’t recognize is showing him into a library, to a grand wall of paintings above a splendid collection of well-kept tomes. The girl and the boy are with them, marveling at the sights. Ventus is drawn immediately to a smaller painting near the end of the row, plainly framed and dim.

It’s a strangely rendered piece- a clutter of objects lay on a dingy table, vases of fresh-picked flowers, bundles of papers and ink pens and strange coins Ventus has never seen. In the middle, there is the bleached skull of a small cat. He wants to reach up and cup it, and he doesn’t know why. The scene is backlit, but there’s no source for it painted in. The light must come from within.

The old man observes him and smiles softly. “I see you are fascinated with the vanitas.”

“Huh-?”

The dream changes, and now he’s on the ground, and the blackberry angel is driving a mess of metal into his chest. Ventus sputters and chokes on the ink that fills his throat. It’s seeping out of him and staining the dirt black. The angel is emotionless.

The dreams change faster, faster. A gasp against his ear, a distant scream of anguish. Things are being taken, stolen, rushed away from the young boy whose heart is far too full. He is blind with grief, and then Ventus is kissing the angel again, and then he’s dying again, and then-

Ventus is shattered from his sleep.

He is thrown into living, air rushing into greedy lungs as he gasps in shock, his body desperately pushing blood throughout itself to wake up his dead limbs. He cannot move for a moment, having gotten used to being unable to, and when he finally remembers how to open his eyes on his own, he sees the ocean-drowned girl. He sees the full-hearted boy.

Then he sees a broken-winged angel.

Someone cries out about a vanitas, and Ventus confusedly looks for the painting, the cat’s skull, but all his can see is his own reflection in the mask of anger the angel wears. They clash, and Ventus’ mouth is filled with the taste of sour fruit. His skin crackles with the evaporation of still clinging dreams.

_You don’t remember._

Ventus cries out in pain, pushing back. The broken boy pushes harder, harder.

_You never do._

He pushes so hard Ventus’ crackling skin breaks, and he bleeds for the first time in longer than he can remember. The girl tries to help, but she bleeds too.

_Then come back, Vanitas, come back._

Ventus thinks the fallen angel is bleeding, too. Vanitas. His name is Vanitas. He doesn’t remember the dreams, only the past.

_I will, always._

Vanitas flees, and Ventus’ heart tugs as if tied by a string to his.

_Always?_

He reaches, cups the cat’s skull and strokes his thumb along it.

 _Always._   



End file.
